


To Come Home To

by Snickfic



Series: To Come Home To [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Mpreg, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-25
Updated: 2011-03-04
Packaged: 2017-10-13 09:12:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Buffy already agreed about Spike having a baby, but the idea is still taking some getting used to. (A series of vignettes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’d been four weeks at least since Buffy had cautiously resigned herself to the idea of having a baby. She’d dismissed the thought of kids long ago, the first time Angel had shot it down, and Riley’s half-stated expectations on the matter had never shaken her. Besides, pregnant Slayer? The world might not survive her maternity leave.

But okay. Spike wanted a kid, there was one already in the making, and they had a few months prep time – more than she got for most apocalypses.

Why else would she be doing a little more-or-less friendly ‘interfacing’ with some warty, green, hornless demons, if not to secure the crew’s – and therefore a baby’s – place in this brave new scheme of things? More negotiation. Bleah. She hadn’t realized how often she killed demons just to shut them up until now when she couldn’t anymore. She wondered less now why Angel’d needed an entire law firm to deal with them.

Anyway, talks over for now, peace between hers and theirs momentarily secured. The sun shone over her shoulder as she pushed in the safe house’s front door.

And found Spike, back to the kitchen counter and mouth to a walkie-talkie, hand absent-mindedly starfished over his stomach. She froze. He glanced up and saw something in her that made him drop his hand and turn away.

Buffy strode past him and climbed the stairs to the training room. Empty. Buffy took a deep breath, thought about Giles’ centering exercises, and dismissed them. With quick, unsteady movements she taped each hand and squared off with the punching bag.

Twenty minutes later the door squeaked open. Spike. She kept eyes and fists at the bag, and after a few minutes he went away again without ever speaking, which made her feel worse.

Her. Spike. Baby.

 _Round kick to the bag._

Scary. Maybe doable.

 _Jab, upper cut._

What he wanted.

 _Double punch. Kick to the knee._

Her: not pregnant. Huge plus.

 _Punch. Left jab. Punch._

Spike: pregnant.

She slammed her foot in at waist height, then jumped aside as the bag swung, chains rattling.

Sure, he’d been putting on weight – finally. Before this, he’d looked almost skeletal. Starvation levels, Giles had been talking. Still adjusting to the whole living-and-breathing thing. Now he was filling out some, and not just around the middle. He looked less like a grinning skull when he laughed, and his ribs less like a double xylophone. And if some of that weight was settling around his stomach, well, that was what happened to human guys with deep-fried fixations.

But she’d seen it in his posture, in the fall of his hand on his belly, just like every stereotypical pregnant woman ever. She hadn’t really believed it until then.

Spike was having their baby. _Spike_ was.

She watched the bag continue to swing – hmm, might want to think about reinforcing the ceiling beam – and tried to think what to do about that.

~*~*~

She went downstairs, past the kitchen where Xander and Dawn were arguing rations, down the second flight to the basement. At the bottom she slid the door quietly open. Dimly she saw Spike stretched out on their bed, shirtless and snoring.

She crept to the bed and settled carefully at the edge. For a while she just looked, watching his chest rise and fall – not a new habit, but somehow mesmerizing now in its necessity. And below his ribs rose the smooth outward curve of his belly, not unmistakeable yet but close to it. A baby. Spike’s baby. She tried to hold onto that idea, to heft it and feel its weight, but it kept slipping away from her.

Instead she reached cautiously out and laid her palm against him, just below his navel. Warm; she hadn’t gotten used to that, either. Maybe she was just getting crotchety, now that she was approaching her mid-twenties. She couldn’t handle change anymore. Anyway, he didn’t _feel_ pregnant, whatever that meant. Just like a guy with a taste for the Brewskis.

Suddenly she realized the quality of Spike’s breathing had changed. She snatched her hand into her lap and looked over to find him looking back. “Hey,” she said.

He glanced down to her hand and back up. “According to the telly, now’s when you tell me how carrying your kid just makes me that much sexier.”

She couldn’t read his tone; it might have been drily amused, or maybe tipped over into bitter. As she watched his eyes, her words sticking in her throat, his expression fell to one she knew on sight: hurt.

She swallowed. “Is it okay if I touch you?”

He huffed a laugh. “Can’t recall ever minding that, so long as it’s not my nose.”

Ignoring all his ever-changing expressions, she laid her hand on him again and swept a slow circle around his bellybutton. Still Spike. Her hand wandered lower, beneath the sheet, and confirmed: still her man. Oh, yeah. Her very interested man.

She glanced up, innuendo on her lips, and was startled to silence by the conflicted desire in his expression. “Is it okay?” she fumbled. “I mean, for...”

“It’s fine,” he said. “I just... I thought I might have to go the next five months without.”

“Without?” Again: startled. “But we’ve... I mean, the other night when I got off patrol - okay, no, but then last week...” She trails off, trying to think. That can’t be right. She’d have noticed. She’d have _missed_ it. Wouldn’t she? “Have we not had sex in four weeks?”

“Four and a half,” he said, hauling himself upright. “The night before... Well. Before the joyous news.”

“And you didn’t _say_ something?” she said.

He lifted an eyebrow. "Figured you not saying anything was message enough."

Her face burned hot with shame. She probably glowed in the dark with it. “Oh, God, Spike. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said, but to the sheet rather than to her. He favored her with a pained half-smile. “A bit of a blow to a man’s masculinity, getting knocked up.”

She tried to think of all the nights fucking each other alive, all the lazy mornings usually filled with lazy morning sex, and instead remembered getting up before him, coming downstairs after him, always thinking: _Let him sleep_. Curling herself into his arms and carefully not noticing the subtle shifts in his personal geography. Not thinking about it.

That was it: her and her award-winning talent for Not Thinking About It.

And there was Spike, sitting next to her and trying hard to look disinterested.

A half-formed thought crystallized. “You want this baby that bad? To not... for another _five months_?”

“Six, counting this last one,” he said. He shrugged, but she saw right through that faux-indifference, mister.

Any doubts she might have had about how serious he was? Smithereens.

Still, he needed this. He needed her to get over her squickies and do this.

She scooted in close and ran her hand up his neck, her ridiculous contrary whole-hearted ex-vampire. She craned to follow his gaze until it met hers. Then she closed in and caught his mouth – _warm_ , and if she wasn’t used to that bit of weirdness yet it didn’t mean it wasn’t good – and started kissing him, long and slow and thorough. She had some catching up to do.

Afterward, as they lay sweaty and tangled together with the sheet wound around their legs, he said, “That my last hurrah, then? ‘Cause I’m not getting any less pregnant from here. Not for a long while, anyway.”

She rolled over, straining to think of some reassurance if what they’d just done wasn’t enough, but he was grinning, the rejected look all wiped away for the moment. “There could be more,” she said, snuggling in tighter against him. “Later. Right now Buffy go sleep.”

Drifting off, she thought: Her guy, pregnant with her baby? Not entirely unsexy.

 _Finis_


	2. Chapter 2

Buffy woke with the certain knowledge that something had changed. She lay still, adrenaline rising and waiting for permission to peak, and listened. There were no mutterings from the far side of the basement, no footsteps, no breath but hers and Spike’s.

But Spike was no more asleep than she was, she realized. “Spike?” In his chest against her back she felt him loose a long breath.

“Buffy?” he said, her name soft and uncertain on his lips.

She rolled over. “What is it?” By the casement window’s indirect light – their most recent compromise with Spike’s nightmares of immolation by sun – she could see him blinking at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read, even after all this practice. Fear? “Spike?” She tried a smile, and felt it lacking. “Starting to wig me out here.”

“I can feel it.” He swallowed. “I can feel the baby. Moving around.”

“Oh,” Buffy breathed. Oh.

“Thought I did, couple of days ago, but I wasn’t sure.”

Oh, Buffy thought again. This was where she was excited, right? Was _he_ excited? He was still staring at her with that wide-eyed bewilderment.

He licked his lips. “You want to...?” He trailed off.

Deep breath, Buffy. “Okay. Yeah.”

He reached for her hand; his was trembling. She shifted so he could lay her hand against his stomach, which had been rounding out with a purpose lately. She closed her eyes and let her fingers soak up the Spike-warmth, waiting for a tell-tale... something. A movement or a tickle, or _something_.

“There,” Spike said. “That. Did you feel it?”

“No,” Buffy said.

“Maybe too faint for you to feel yet,” he said, head ducking in disappointment. After a moment he returned to that intense sideways stare. “Anyway, I can, now.”

Waiting, she thought. He was waiting for her reaction. And God, she might not be – was still _so_ not – sure how she felt about this idea, but she knew exactly how she felt about Spike, who had a grin trembling at the corners of his mouth, ready to break loose or fall on her word. She summoned a better smile than her first one and said, “That’s incredible.”

His grin shone bright enough to set a vamp on fire, deep enough to lose a girl’s heart in. “Yeah,” he said. It was like she’d come walking down Mom’s stairs all over again, the way he was looking at her now. _Joy_ , that’s what he’d been wanting her permission for but still trying to disguise, in case she... freaked out?

She found his hand and squeezed it. Then, like a stake between the eyes, it hit her again. “Oh, God, Spike, we’re really having a baby.” She wondered how many more of these epiphanies it’d take before the reality finally sunk in.

He pulled her against his chest, and she settled in, hands pressed to his ever-wondrous warmth. “We are, are we?,” he said. “ _We_ are having a baby?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, honey, _you_ are having a baby.”

“Just so long as my contribution here is properly appreciated.”

She pulled away far enough to slip a hand down and rub his stomach. “Your contribution's pretty hard to miss, actually.”

“Oy! I’m... It’s... I’m not _that_ big yet.”

“But you will be.” It wasn’t something she’d thought that hard on, because the visual of Spike at nine months induced more wigging than she could squash gracefully, at least so far. But now she tried it, picturing her sleek panthery ex-vampire with a belly waxing full and sticking out to _there_. Then she had to fight down the giggle, because the look he was giving her wasn’t any too certain. “You’ll be the hottest pregnant guy ever,” she said. “Promise.”

He swallowed. “Right.”

Good job, Buffy. Way to crash the mood of the fragile father-to-be. “Is this one of those times where you’re freaking out and I’m not supposed to tease you?”

His eyes met her hers for an instant and dropped again. “Could be.”

“A baby,” she said, sliding her hand over his bellybutton. Get him focused on the part he cared about, and he forgot the weird. “You’re making us a baby.”

A deep Spike-breath. “Yeah.” The grin started to break through the clouds.

She dropped her voice. “And you’re looking pretty damn sexy doing it, Mister.”

“Yeah?”

Sex? Another excellent diversionary tactic. “Yeah,” she said.

But instead of taking her up on what she meant for an invitation, he relaxed. “All right,” he said. “All right.” After a moment, his hand drifted to her hair and he began curling bits of it around his fingers. “Hottest pregnant guy ever?”

“No question,” Buffy said, settling in again.

“I’m going to look ridiculous.”

“ _Pregnant_ , with our _baby_.”

“And also hot.” He didn’t sound as if he quite believed her, but he didn’t sound like it mattered too much, either. For now, anyway.

“Yep.” And if not, she was by every hellgod whose ass she’d ever kicked going to fake it, because her guy was being brave like she wasn’t sure she’d ever want to be, and he needed all the support she could manage. Supporto-Buffy, that was her.

But drifting off to sleep again, her hand strategically placed over his stomach in case of fetal kick repeat, what sounded over and over in her head was, _Oh God, we’re having a baby._

So, still not quite used to that part yet.


End file.
